The U.S. government restricts exports of various products for purposes of national security, foreign policy, control of crime and other reasons of national interest. Export controls are drafted sufficiently broad to adequately protect national interests. However, broad export controls may be overly restrictive for certain technologies and prevent some commercial interests from fully realizing a planned return on investment.
Special export licenses are required for exports of some dual use products. Restricted dual use products are identified by the Department of Commerce on the Commerce Control List. The restrictions of the Commerce Control List apply to devices for which the function is unknown, which impacts devices such as programmable integrated circuits (ICs).
A programmable IC can include field programmable gate array (FPGA) logic, digital signal processors (DSPs), analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), digital-to-analog converters (DACs), one or more instruction processors (CPUs, GPUs etc.), and various I/O circuitry. As a programmable IC is programmable, the function of the device can be considered to be unknown and subject to restrictive regulations.
Grey market programmable ICs can also hurt sales by the makers of programmable ICs. Programmable ICs may sometimes be found on the grey market in a scenario in which the programmable ICs are sold by the maker to the buyer at a reduced price, the buyer is unable to use all the programmable ICs in the buyer's products, the buyer sells the programmable ICs at a discount to a reseller, and the reseller offers the programmable ICs at a price less than the price offered by the maker. The maker of the programmable ICs may have forecasted sales and planned production assuming that the programmable ICs sold to the buyer would not be on the market. The device maker may thereby suffer a loss in planned sales.